FastTree infers approximately-maximum-likelihood phylogenetic trees from alignments of nucleotide or protein sequences. FastTree can handle alignments with up to a million of sequences in a reasonable amount of time and memory. For large alignments, FastTree is 100-1,000 times faster than PhyML 3.0 or RAxML 7.
FastTree is more accurate than PhyML 3 with default settings, and much more accurate than the distance-matrix methods that are traditionally used for large alignments. FastTree uses the Jukes-Cantor or generalized time-reversible (GTR) models of nucleotide evolution and the JTT (Jones-Taylor-Thornton 1992), WAG (Whelan & Goldman 2001), or LG (Le and Gascuel 2008) models of amino acid evolution. To account for the varying rates of evolution across sites, FastTree uses a single rate for each site (the "CAT" approximation). To quickly estimate the reliability of each split in the tree, FastTree computes local support values with the Shimodaira-Hasegawa test (these are the same as PhyML 3's "SH-like local supports").
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